VMware™ provides cloud and virtualization software and services. The desktop software for VMware™ runs on Microsoft Windows™, Linux™, and Mac OS X™, while its enterprise software hypervisors for servers, such as VMware ESX and VMware ESXi, are bare-metal hypervisors that run directly on server hardware without requiring an additional underlying operating system (OS).
A hypervisor, sometimes called a virtual machine manager, is the key, integral component allowing the virtual functionality. It is a piece of computer software, firmware or hardware that creates and runs virtual machines. A hypervisor allows multiple operating systems to share a single hardware host. Each OS appears to have the host's complete processor, memory, and other resources all to itself, but in reality, the hosts are being shared.
Two main types of hypervisors exist. These are Type I hypervisor and Type II hypervisor. Type 1 hypervisors are the first to be installed on the server, as the OS will be the hypervisor. Type II hypervisors is loaded on the top of a live OS allowing for resources to pass through the virtual machine.
A host machine, referred to as a physical host, runs one or more virtual machines. Each virtual machine is called a guest machine and is the workload installed on top of the hypervisor. The hypervisor presents the guest OS with a virtual operating platform, and manages the execution of the guest OSs. Multiple instances of a variety of OSs may share the virtualized hardware resources.
Some of the biggest software creators are now creating design and best practices around a virtual infrastructure. The industry has shifted from a single hardware configuration to platforms that create a more efficient data center in which resources are shared between numerous workloads.
Mobile Virtualization Platform
Products both in research and in the market today allow hypervisor technology to be installed on mobile devices, allowing people to buy their own devices and run a separate version of the OS dedicated to business-oriented applications. Users can download the virtual application, allowing the user to have both personal and business-oriented profiles on the device.
VMware's™ Mobile Virtualization Platform (MVP) makes use of system virtualization to deliver an end-to-end solution for facilitating employee-owned phones in the enterprise environment. Due to security needs, Type II hypervisors are preferred application for the mobile (or client) devices. However, this implementation may encounter performance hits as mode and context switches are increased.
The MVP solution merges the hypervisor back into the host by loading a MVP module into the host OS kernel. The MVP module effectively hijacks the host by re-writing the exception vectors, so it obtains control whenever the guest kernel is entered. The process effectively turns the host kernel into a hypervisor. The result is that it is not a Type I or Type II hypervisor any more, but is referred to as a hybrid hypervisor, i.e., a mix of the two types of hypervisors. These hybrid hypervisors require the insertion of a kernel module into the host OS (a major security-critical operation), which require special privileges. On client devices, this requires cooperation with the device manufactures as they frown on any access to the OS.
MVP allows for the use of multiple profiles on a single device. For example, one profile can be for personal use, and on for business use. MVP is a thin layer of software that is embedded onto a mobile phone, decoupling the applications and data from the underlying hardware. It is optimized to run efficiently on low-power-consuming and memory-constrained mobile phones.
Mobile Device Clouds
The offloading of computation from client devices to remote cloud resources or closely located computing resources known as cloudlets have been researched. The shared devices may belong to the same household or by a large group of people, e.g., in a military or disaster scenario. In these cases, the incentive to collaborate on computational tasks is not an issue and the communal goal of prolonging the lifetime of the collection of devices makes sense. This incentive is further amplified if a connection to a cloud (or network) is costly, unreliable, or simply unavailable.
Research further involves the initial state of power availability in a collection of collaborative mobile devices, and a set of computational tasks with known or estimated power consumption profiles on the mobile devices to determine the best approach to schedule the computation among the set of shared devices so as to maximize their lifetime. The concept of a mobile device cloud (MDC) is derived and determined to be a set of mobile devices functionally working together, sharing resources. Such an offloading context involves a highly collaborative context where the goal of computational offloading is to maximize the lifetime of the MDC.
Mobile Device Management
Mobile device management (MDM) includes over-the-air distribution of applications, data, and configuration settings for all types of client devices such as phones, tablets, mobile computers, printers and Point of Sale (POS) devices, etc.
Products in the market today have tools that assist in setting user policies including setting passwords, application usage, controlling employee access to corporate resources, prohibiting the jail-breaking of corporate devices, and security features that can wipe corporate data clean from the client device if compromised.
The rise in “Bring Your Own Device” (BYOD) in the corporate world is requiring organizations to ensure increased security for both the client device and the enterprise they connect to. By controlling and protecting the data and configuration settings for all client devices in the network (including the BYOD devices), MDM can reduce support costs and business risks. The intent of MDM is to optimize the functionality and security of a mobile communications network while minimizing cost and downtime. As the BYOD approach becomes increasingly popular across mobile service providers, MDM gives the corporations the ability to provide employees with access to the internal networks using a client device of their choice, while these client devices are managed remotely with minimal disruption to employees' schedules.
MDM may provide a solution for managing corporate-owned client devices, as well as personal client devices in the workplace. The primary challenge is the ability to manage the risks associated with mobile access to data while securing company issued and BYOD client devices. Typical solutions include a server component, which sends out the management commands to the client devices, and a client component, which runs on the client device and receives and implements the management commands.
Device management specifications include platform-independent device management protocol called Open Mobile Alliance Device Management (OMADM). OMADM is designed for management of mobile devices and is intended to support the following uses provisioning, device configuration, software upgrades, and fault management.
Over-the-air programming (OTA) capabilities, for example, are considered a main component of mobile network operator and enterprise-grade mobile device management software. These include the ability to remotely configure a single client device, an entire fleet of client devices, or any IT-defined set of client devices. OTA also sends software and OS updates, remotely locks and wipes a client device to protect the data stored on the client device when it is lost or stolen, and remote troubleshooting. OTA commands are sent as a binary SMS message, which includes binary data.
Cortana
The arrival of Cortana™, a digital assistant for Windows™ mobile operating system competes directly with Apple's Siri™ and Google Now™ for the chance to organize a user's appointments, contacts, travel arrangements, and all of the other minutiae of daily life. Cortana analyzes how a user uses his or her phone, learning the topics the user interested in, when the user is busy, and where the user is traveling to.
Cortana™ delivers a summary of relevant news stories at the start of the day, and allows users to set up a “quiet time”. During quiet time, calls and texts are silenced, and contacts are notified of this restriction. The notebook feature lets you tweak what the app knows about you, providing a more granular level of control than either Siri™ or Google Now™.
In many ways, Cortana™ combines voice search of SIRI™ with the suggestions of Google Now™, which are based on a user's location, time, and appointment calendar.
Siri
Siri™ plugs into a user's emails, contacts, and calendar, but does not try to find out everything about the user. Siri™ is much more of a natural language voice user interface, and Cortana™ is a bit of a blend of the two approaches.”
Google Now
Google Now™ is activated and controlled by voice. This application predicts what information the user needs and when. Recent searches, regular travel routes, and email messages are all scanned to determine what the user may require or need. This application, however, fails to wait for the user to submit an inquiry.
However, none of the above approaches provides a single device with a business based personal assistant and a personal based personal assistant. Thus, an alternative approach may be beneficial.